Feminism

• Middle Class women
  • Rebel against “separate spheres,”
    • Idea that men are the breadwinners, the woman says home with the children
  • Get education and jobs
  • Shopping by catalogue and department store
  • Elite women’s colleges
  • By 1900, 1/3 of clerical jobs filled by women
  • Social and some economic independence
    • Bicycle and book clubs
    • Dance halls
    • More premarital sex
• Feminism
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    • Called for release of women form domestic chores
  • Margaret Sanger, The Woman Rebel
    • About birth control— allows women to control their body
  • Emma Goldman
    • Denounced marriage as prostitution
    • Endorsed the idea of “free love,” love w/o contracts of marriage
  • Alice Paul
    • Founded National Women’s Party for suffrage
  • Greenwich Village, in Manhattan
    • Crystal Eastman, Heterodoxy, a feminist group
    • Feminist challenge: "how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity."
  • Vice Commissions
    • Crack down on prostitution, drunkenness, pornography
  • Campaign for prohibition, regulation of movie theaters
  • Mann Act, 1910
    • Made transportation of women across state lines for immoral purpose illegal